Jump to content

Type keyword(s) to search

Commercials That Annoy, Irritate or Outright Enrage


  • Reply
  • Start Topic

Recommended Posts

One that outright enrages me is Angie's List.

Why the F should I have to PAY to get a recommendation? ! A business that gets bad reviews can get a reputation repair service to channge them on Yahoo, Yelp, Home Advisor, and yes, Angie's List.

So why am I paying for something that may not be true, and I can get for free everywhere else! And Home Advisor is a good place to get recommendations.

Angie, you're a rip off! I hate your smug face!

Edited by roamyn
  • Love 6

One that outright enrages me is Angie's List.

Why the F should I have to PAY to get a recommendation? ! A business that gets bad reviews can get a reputation repair service to channge them on Yahoo, Yelp, Home Advisor, and yes, Angie's List.

So why am I paying for something that may not be true, and I can get for free everywhere else! And Home Advisor is a good place to get recommendations.

Angie, you're a rip off! I hate your smug face!

 

Yeah, I don't quite understand how Angie's list hasn't folded, unless there are people out there who just have extra money, but I say, go buy shoes with that extra money!  Don't pay for Yelp by another name!

One that outright enrages me is Angie's List.

Why the F should I have to PAY to get a recommendation? ! A business that gets bad reviews can get a reputation repair service to channge them on Yahoo, Yelp, Home Advisor, and yes, Angie's List.

So why am I paying for something that may not be true, and I can get for free everywhere else! And Home Advisor is a good place to get recommendations.

Angie, you're a rip off! I hate your smug face!

What's really infuriating is that they don't tell you it costs money until after they get your name & address. They say it's because the cost is different depending on where you live (Why would telling me the Joe the plumber is good cost more in one place than the other?) but they still have your personal information if you don't want to sign up. Who knows what they do with it.

 

I once looked up Home Advisor reviews & saw OK reviews from people who used the service, but terrible reviews from the businesses that are part of it. I would not be comfortable taking a recommendation from them, I don't need an angry contractor. 

My late grandmother had two very kitchy framed directives in her bathroom. They were probably 1960s- or '70s-era; I seem to remember them being very colorful and featuring a little girl. The girl and maybe other items (flower images?) in the frame had identical copies and were layered or stacked atop each other--two or three each--so they had kind of a 3-D or shadow effect. One picture said, "If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie." The other said, "We aim to please. You aim too, please."

Weirdly enough, I was recently telling a guy at work about them, and here I'm talking about them again when I'd not thought about those weird pictures in at least 25 years. I told work guy that my grandparents needed a pool so they could get a third picture that said, "We don't swim in your toilet; don't pee in our pool."

  • Love 1

I'm not sure I understand that one. Aren't you supposed to hit the water? Have I been doing it wrong all this time?

One last anecdote: my mother cross-stitched and framed a "sampler" and hung it over the toilet paper roll in the bathroom in the house where my folks still live/where I grew up. The sampler features an "old-fashioned" young girl in a bonnet, sitting on a chamberpot. Only her back is shown. The text reads, "No job is finished until the paperwork is done." I remember puzzling about that so much as a kid. It didn't strike me until way later than it should've that "paperwork" meant toilet paper.

I am not nearly as country as it might sound. No one in my family runs a methamphetamine operation of any kind, and we have all our teeth.

Edited by bilgistic
  • Love 2

One last anecdote: my mother cross-stitched and framed a "sampler" and hung it over the toilet paper roll in the bathroom in the house where my folks still live/where I grew up. The sampler features an "old-fashioned" young girl in a bonnet, sitting on a chamberpot. Only her back is shown. The text reads, "No job is finished until the paperwork is done." I remember puzzling about that so much as a kid. It didn't strike me until way later than it should've that "paperwork" meant toilet paper.

 

I used to have one of those "rules of the bathroom" signs. Mine had cutesy rules like  "46 person occupancy strictly enforced", "No singing in the shower", "If you use the rubber ducky, please dry it off when you're through", etc.

The Angie's List ad that drives me BSC is the one about the rescue dog.  If you are too stupid to figure out what you need for a dog and you think you really need so much, don't get one.  Do you know of any veterinarians?  Can you find a pet store?  Do some research on dog food?  None of these are difficult to find.  Chances are the agency you got the dog from can point you in the right direction. Thanks Angie!  I'm too stupid to use google or yelp so I'm really glad you came through for me.  (OK it also annoys because it implies that the rescue dog needs so much help/care.  I work with rescues and hate anything that implies they have major problems.  They are not damaged goods.)

  • Love 8

Crap, New!Wendy is back. This time she's eating burgers with a couple of friends and this other guy, and the second woman says about the guy Wendy is with, "He looks so.....handsome." Wendy says, "I told him we were having Gouda chicken," or some other nonsense. The camera moves to focus on the guy, and he's wearing this vaguely fug suit, and he looks up from stuffing his piehole and says, in this unnecessarily smug tone, "It's a rental."

 

So firstly, why on earth would you rent a suit to go eat burgers? Smoked Gouda on chicken doesn't actually sound that bad, but what makes it so good that you need to dress up? Also, why does he sound so smug? The suit was kind of ugly, so unless his uncle owns a formal wear shop and gave him a discount when he rented the thing, I don't see why he sounds so proud of it. It's just annoying. And stupid. And annoying some more.

So firstly, why on earth would you rent a suit to go eat burgers? Smoked Gouda on chicken doesn't actually sound that bad, but what makes it so good that you need to dress up? Also, why does he sound so smug? The suit was kind of ugly, so unless his uncle owns a formal wear shop and gave him a discount when he rented the thing, I don't see why he sounds so proud of it. It's just annoying. And stupid. And annoying some more.

 

I guess Gouda is so high-end you need to rent formal wear?  Even given that premise (although Gouda is sort of a commonplace ingredient in the USA circa 2014), who even does that, unless you're renting a tux?  I just don't get it.  Sigh . . . I wish I didn't feel the need to make sense out of these stupid-ass commercials.

 

"No job is finished until the paperwork is done."

When my mom lived out in the country, there was a guy in a trailer across the "crick" from her.  He was, essentially, a squatter, so she sicced the health department on him.  Turned out he had a big plastic bucket with a toilet seat perched on it.  The Health Inspector checked it out and came back to my mom's, laughing his damn head off because above that makeshift potty was hanging that "paperwork" sign. 

Claude couldn't prove he wasn't dumping sewage into the crick, so he was forced to move.  I bet the Charmin Bears were glad he was done filching their paper.

I admit that I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to language, spelling, grammar.  There is a series of Polident commercials where the spokesperson (who is portrayed as a professional, be it dentist or tech) says the following: "Dentures are very different TO real teeth." NO NO NO!  "Different FROM real teeth."  Or "Different THAN real teeth."  TO is the exact opposite of FROM!  Gah these commercials are like fingernails on a chalk-board!

  • Love 9

I admit that I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to language, spelling, grammar.  There is a series of Polident commercials where the spokesperson (who is portrayed as a professional, be it dentist or tech) says the following: "Dentures are very different TO real teeth." NO NO NO!  "Different FROM real teeth."  Or "Different THAN real teeth."  TO is the exact opposite of FROM!  Gah these commercials are like fingernails on a chalk-board!

 

Apropos of nothing, this reminds me of an old one that used to grind my gears.  Remember the original Vitorin commercials?  Where they'd show plates of food and then someone dressed up similarly to the food and say, "You got your high cholesterol from Uncle Davey"?  I used to shout at the television, "Not unless Mom was fucking Uncle Davey and he's really your FATHER!"  Ughhh, it used to drive me INSANE.  Mostly because it was for a fucking pharmaceutical . . . you'd think that people who market drugs would have some understanding of heredity.  You don't "get" something from your uncles, aunts and cousins unless it's a communicable disease.

 

One day, they aired one of the spots, with the same people that used to be "Uncle Charlie" and "Cousin Sue" or whatever, only now they were "Grandpa Bill" and "Your Dear Mother."  My husband turned to me and happily announced, "Look honey!  They fixed it!"  No doubt because he realized his days of listening to me go ballistic about it were finally and mercifully over.

Edited by Aquarius
  • Love 4

I admit that I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to language, spelling, grammar.  There is a series of Polident commercials where the spokesperson (who is portrayed as a professional, be it dentist or tech) says the following: "Dentures are very different TO real teeth." NO NO NO!  "Different FROM real teeth."  Or "Different THAN real teeth."  TO is the exact opposite of FROM!  Gah these commercials are like fingernails on a chalk-board!

 

That ad has been driving me nuts (well, further than I already was) for months now!

  • Love 1
So firstly, why on earth would you rent a suit to go eat burgers?

 

Because you're too low class to own a suit? Because you have an audience with the Burger King? Because you want to start a trend for "burger-wear?"

 

 

I admit that I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to language, spelling, grammar.  There is a series of Polident commercials where the spokesperson (who is portrayed as a professional, be it dentist or tech) says the following: "Dentures are very different TO real teeth." NO NO NO!  "Different FROM real teeth."  Or "Different THAN real teeth."  TO is the exact opposite of FROM!  Gah these commercials are like fingernails on a chalk-board!

 

"Different to" seems to be a British-ism, but I've heard it infrequently for as long as I can remember. I have an uncle who uses both "to" and "from", seemingly at random. Drives me nuts.

Edited by Sandman87
  • Love 1

I admit that I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to language, spelling, grammar.  There is a series of Polident commercials where the spokesperson (who is portrayed as a professional, be it dentist or tech) says the following: "Dentures are very different TO real teeth." NO NO NO!  "Different FROM real teeth."  Or "Different THAN real teeth."  TO is the exact opposite of FROM!  Gah these commercials are like fingernails on a chalk-board!

 

 

That ad has been driving me nuts (well, further than I already was) for months now!

 

 

Because you're too low class to own a suit? Because you have an audience with the Burger King? Because you want to start a trend for "burger-wear?"

 

 

 

"Different to" seems to be a British-ism, but I've heard it infrequently for as long as I can remember. I have an uncle who uses both "to" and "from", seemingly at random. Drives me nuts.

Years ago I was exchanging letters with someone and was I accused of misusing the English language and thinking I was so smart. She went so far as to write out the definitions of the words I misused. I wrote back that it is not that I am smarter than you, it is just that I have a better dictionary than you. Actually I was in the middle of a reading list of books written in the 1700's and 1800's. I had to get an unabridged dictionary to decipher all the archaic meaning of far to many words. It was then that I realized that some people who are well educated can seem to sound rather dumb or incorrect when actually they are using their words in their truer sense.

 

Like someone above I have heard "different to" on and off for years. I have always thought it incorrect also. However when I write I have a tendency to use that form, then I must go back on a proof read and correct it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7amkz9NlP-A

 

"We invented light beer."  Um, no, you didn't.  It was originally developed in the '60s as "Gablinger's Diet Beer," then the recipe was given to Meister Brau, which was eventually purchased by Miller.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Lite#History

Edited by smittykins

Is having an audience with the Burger King the same thing as waking up with the King? Because that really would involve pee.

Holy crap, remember those awful commercials?  Why the hell someone thought that would convince anyone that they needed breakfast at BK, I don't understand.

 

I finally saw the Wendy's commercial in question.  The rented suit looks like something a guy* would rent for prom or wedding usher.  So I guess they're going with the "Gouda as an event" theme.  Still stupid though.

 

* one with bad taste, apparently

Edited by Aquarius

I don't like the Dumb Asterisk ads.  I get the joke -- Dumb Ass-terisk, but does he have to beat on people?

 

All the fast food burger/taco ads that show people eating the stuff at home or at the office.  Because a McDonald's burger & fries is only palatable when it's hot.  One of my kids worked at McD's years ago and said the food is tossed if it isn't sold within 15 minutes.  So even McDonald's knows it's crappy unless it's right off the grill/out of the fryer.

 

Most other ads bug me only when they're overly-rotated.  If you've got the money to pay for ad time, use some of it to make a different ad. 

"Different to" is actually preferred usage in the UK as far as I know. In the US, although I know people say "different than," only "different from" sounds right to me. Perfectionism in grammar/usage (I'm prone to it as well, so I sympathize) can be perilous. I've recently erased the consist/comprise distinction from the list of things I worry about, having been shown that they've been used interchangeably for many hundreds of years. Similarly the superstition that "none" must be singular. And I've decided to embrace the use of "they" as our neutral third-person singular (in informal contexts, at least) as we have nothing else to do the job.

  • Love 1

A local bed & mattress shop is running a Labor Day sale ad with a "talking" bulldog puppy. The dog repeats something several times, and the last time he does it he adds "not to labor the point." No! Bad Dog! It's "belabor the point", where belabor means "to beat soundly", as in "belabor the idiot who wrote this commercial."

Edited by Sandman87
  • Love 4
A local bed & mattress shop is running a Labor Day sale ad with a "talking" bulldog puppy. The dog repeats something several times, and the last time he does it he adds "not to labor the point." No! Bad Dog! It's "belabor the point", where belabor means "to beat soundly", as in "belabor the idiot who wrote this commercial."

 

I'm willing to cut that one some slack because I'm betting that dog didn't get a complete education.

  • Love 2

Speaking of show promos, I wish that Adrian Brody's Houdini would go ahead and air on The History Channel so those damned commercials would get out of my face. I don't have anything against him, but they run those ads all the time.

 

I was going to post about that over in the "Scratch your head" thread. Because I didn't know that The History Channel still made shows about actual history.

 

ETA: As they move away from programming shows about history I wonder if The History Channel execs are frustrated at the fact that they can't follow in the steps of networks like A&E and AMC and rebrand using just their initials.

Edited by xaxat
  • Love 2

The car commercial (Acura, maybe?) with some guy screeching a hideous version of "My Way" at top volume makes me want to shoot my TV.

That guy would be Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. It is weird to me that they would his version of that song. It wasn't made to be taken seriously. And definitely not for a car commercial. Strange days indeed.

  • Love 3

Just saw a new Kmart ad where grandma shops at Kmart and becomes a hip-hop mogul. Or something. Apparently she saves enough to fling benjamins at the camera with glee. Maybe this should be posted in the Say What?: Commercials That Made Us Scratch Our Heads thread because, WTF? I found the commercial equally annoying so it can go either way. Has anyone else seen this?

 

Edited for grammar.

Edited by turbogirlnyc
  • Love 1

I was going to post about that over in the "Scratch your head" thread. Because I didn't know that The History Channel still made shows about actual history.

 

ETA: As they move away from programming shows about history I wonder if The History Channel execs are frustrated at the fact that they can't follow in the steps of networks like A&E and AMC and rebrand using just their initials.

 

Their logo is a giant H, so I'm sure they are going to try.  Since their programming seems focused on rednecks who like to pawn stuff I too am shocked at an actual program about history.  

  • Love 3
ETA: As they move away from programming shows about history I wonder if The History Channel execs are frustrated at the fact that they can't follow in the steps of networks like A&E and AMC and rebrand using just their initials.

 

Their logo is a giant H, so I'm sure they are going to try.

 

"The H channel"? Sounds like the network for junkies.

  • Love 4

Just saw a new Kmart ad where grandma shops at Kmart and becomes a hip-hop mogul. Or something. Apparently she saves enough to fling benjamins at the camera with glee. Maybe this should be posted in the Say What?: Commercials That Made Us Scratch Our Heads thread because, WTF? I found the commercial equally annoying so it can go either way. Has anyone else seen this?

 

Edited for grammar.

 

Yes, and quite disgusting to see a senior citizen gyrate her ass, and it's equally bad that we have to see the kind of panties that she's buying and her making it "rain" when paying for it. Is Kmart this damn desperate and out of ideas. I think I'm never gonna shop there again.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOZjaFfciss

 

 

That McDonalds Eco Nom Nom Nom commercial is annoying as hell. If food makes me talk and sound like that, no thank you. I'm sick of commercials trying to create catchy words or phrases that will never ever become part of the English language. That's the problem with advertising today, they want to create words that just doesn't exist in hopes that it will catch on.

 

Edited by ShadowSixx
  • Love 5

I'm on the side of "pretty fantastic" for the Kmart ad. I imagine it was a ball to shoot. That lady looks like an awesome grandma. We rarely get our reserved Baptist grandma to loosen up and dance, let alone shake her ass. The very thought!

As I near 40, it's nice to remind myself that age doesn't mean a thing.

  • Love 7

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...